By the Numbers: September 2013

Total read since January: 28
(target is 36 by December, to be on track I should have read 24 books by now)

I didn’t have much time to read this month. I only finished two books. But I started (and nearly finished) two more — see the Goodreads “currently reading” box in the side bar for a preview of what’s coming next month…

Crown of Midnight — worthy sequel to Throne of Glass… but feels a bit like a “middle book”… still, I really like this world and these characters, so I devoured this one and am eagerly awaiting the next one in the series. When I have more time I may go back and re-read the first one and then this one and try to write something more thoughtful later. There are many references to events in the first book which I barely remembered, and it relies heavily on knowledge of what happened in the first novel to understand what’s going on in this one.

Silent Harmony — super fast, fun read… talented and ambitious “underdog” heroine + boarding school + horses… definitely a literature niche that appeals to many young women and girls — and I would definitely recommend this to anyone that likes that combination. The mystery aspect was mostly well done and kept me guessing about “who done it” until the end. Though, if I knew more about horses and horse culture politics I might have had a better idea from the hints provided. I only gave it two stars because I’m several years past my horses + boarding school phase. However, I can see how this would be a 3-4 star book for someone who is still really drawn to that stuff.

Writing

I’ve been working on “developing the novel” this month and, besides the swimming workout posts, managed to write four blog posts in September. I was trying to match the swimming workout posts one for one so that anyone who doesn’t like to read about my swimming workouts would still have something to read on my blog.

I started having a bit of a “blog crisis” over the weekend… these are the periodical events that cause me to kill my blog and hide under a social media rock for a while. Not sure exactly what’s behind this one, but for now I’m resisting the urge to retreat into my shell.

Swimming

My US Masters Swimming FLOG (Fitness Log) says I swam:

20 of 31 days (target was ~20 days)

38.78 miles (target was ~30 miles)

Last month of the “training” phase of my workout plan. I hit it hard and am looking forward to taper and a big race and a little rest in October before jumping back into the training phase and starting prep for the spring racing season.

Movies

Three movies this month! I am still not in much of a movie watching mood. But since Greg broke his foot and has been in a cast, movie watching picked back up again in September. The movies we watched this month were:

Winter’s Bone — resisted watching this for a while because I wasn’t sure I would like it, but boy was I wrong! This was a really good movie — possibly the best movie we watched all year. Definitely the best movie from this month. After watching this I went and added all the “2013 Oscar buzz” movies to my queue so I won’t be the last to watch the good movies this year.

Spy Game — this is an older movie that Greg added to the queue (I am getting sick of Netflix and movies, and he’s the one with the cast on his leg, so I let him pick). Again I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a spy movie and it has Robert Redford and Brad Pitt, so I wasn’t expecting much. But, it’s a really well done spy movie… not a special effects, blow things up, ooh look at all my awesome technology spy movie. A nice change of pace.

Kings of Summer — I thought this was going to be good. I missed the free screening at work, and the trailer looked promising. It was okay. Some parts were really funny. Some parts were really thoughtful. But I lost count after the third “bonding montage” of the boys in the woods. And Greg was frustrated because he didn’t find it at all realistic that they would have been able to build this cabin in the woods in such a short period of time and with nothing but bikes to haul stuff to the construction site. But… the funny parts were funny… oh well.

Seriously cannot believe it’s October already! This year is going by so quickly.